For the last couple of years, as someone out of favor with the increasingly authoritarian regime, he had been constantly kept under the radar of Internal Security. Although he was still holding on to a marginalized position, he knew better than to land himself further into trouble.

  Halfway through the lane now, and he’d still met with no one. The black-painted shikumen doors were all shut tight. A large number of the families had already moved away, and it was apparent that the remaining ones were about to move, too.

  More than twenty years passed like a dream.

  What a surprise for me still to be here!

  To Chen’s surprise, after he’d taken a few more steps, someone jumped up like a black cat from out of the boxes and bags of nondescript junk. It was four-eyed Zhang, another small audience member who’d sat listening to the evening talks with Chen during those long-ago days. He must have stayed on in the lane all these years.

  ‘Chief Inspector Chen?’

  ‘Zhang!’

  ‘On another investigation here?’

  ‘No. I’ve heard that the lane is going to disappear soon. I miss the evening talks, you know. Perhaps we have both reached the age to be nostalgic.’

  ‘You may be able to afford the luxury of nostalgia, Chief Inspector Chen,’ Zhang said, ‘but we cannot. This lane is no longer the lane you remember.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The evening talks you just mentioned? They were gone even earlier than the lane itself. You may have heard of the brand-new term “thoughtcrimes.” In the official classification, one of these so-called thoughtcrimes is to “talk irresponsibly about the decisions of the Party leadership.” With the Beijing government alone in a position to define and determine what counts as “talking irresponsibly,” our evening talks turned out to be way too risky under a sky woven with evil surveillance cameras.’

  ‘What a shame!’ Chen said. ‘I still remember these dramatic, exciting narrations performed by Old Root. He must be too old to come out these days.’

  ‘He’s gone, poor Old Root. About two years ago, he was invited out by Internal Security for a cup of tea. Another new Internet term, you know; it means Internal Security wants to give you a serious warning on the pretense of inviting you out to have a cup of tea. What will happen if you don’t mend your ways, you can imagine. After the tea, the old man sank into a depression and passed away with two surveillance cameras newly installed above his door.’

  ‘People cannot be too careful today,’ Chen said, looking around nervously.

  ‘That’s so true. And that’s what Old Root repeatedly said in his last days,’ Zhang said, bowing low as if in a Buddhist service for the deceased, then sighing before he turned to head out of the lane – to run some errands, he told Chen before he left.

  Chen resumed walking, his steps heavy. Drawing nearer to the back exit of the lane, he saw a ramshackle foot-massaging salon. It showed a ‘closed’ sign on the black-painted door. There was something vaguely familiar about the salon, which had been converted out of an original shikumen house.

  Was it the same place where a middle-school teacher of his had got into trouble for her private tutoring at the beginning of the ‘reform,’ and he, then an emerging chief inspector, had managed to help out? Those details faded in his memory. But for the present moment, private tutoring was banned nationwide again, just as in the Cultural Revolution.

  The spring left in a hurry.

  How much more relentless wind

  and rain could it survive?

  Another notice in small characters on the discolored wall of the salon brought him, ironically, a touch of cold comfort.

  Due to the Covid pandemic, the urban development project is postponed until further notice.

  At least Red Dust Lane might be able to survive for a short while longer.

  Stepping out of the back exit of the lane, he glimpsed a formally dressed woman standing across Ninghai Road. She was probably in her mid-thirties, smoking in front of the Neighborhood Committee Office and staring up at him on high alert.

  Ninghai Road, a long, wet street market stretching for ever in his childhood memory, had also changed dramatically. Those gray, chipped concrete stalls, an unacceptable sight for the ‘magical ultra-modern city of Shanghai,’ had been moved into a large concrete building of multiple floors on Zhejiang Road.

  There was something elusive about the woman flicking cigarette ash in front of the Neighborhood Committee Office. He could have met her before, Chen thought, though it appeared quite unlikely. Was it during one of the last few investigations he had conducted there as a cop with the help of the neighborhood committee?

  Recognition hit home when his glance swept up to a mole at the left corner of her mouth. It was a large mole – the same size and shape as her late mother’s. Old Yan had been the neighborhood committee’s Party secretary in the last century. As in those long-ago days, the sight still sent a chill down his spine.

  According to a schoolmate of his nicknamed Overseas Chinese Lu, Old Yan had repeatedly led a neighborhood propaganda team, beating drums and gongs two or three times a day, under the window of Lu’s room, shouting the thundering slogans and songs of the Cultural Revolution: ‘Lu, you have to listen to Chairman Mao, and you have to go to the countryside for reeducation from the poor and lower-class peasants.’

  Lu gave up after a week of the bombarding propaganda and went to an impoverished village in Anhui Province. For the young people of his generation, it was one of the most disastrous political movements of the Cultural Revolution.

  But was it possible Old Yan’s daughter had inherited her enviable position as Party secretary?

  Neighborhood committees were government-funded. The cadres were treated as civil servants or state employees with unbreakable job security. Plus there was the power and the pocket profit. Neighbors had to stuff red envelopes into their pockets for one reason or another. In recent years, the neighborhood committee members were said to be enjoying even more power as ‘indispensable ears, eyes, noses’ in the government’s drive to maintain political stability. In other words, they were now mobile human surveillance cameras, prowling around all the time to keep potential troublemakers under control. More energetic, more comprehensive, more politically correct, they were capable of taking matters into their own hands and combing through all the areas uncovered by the cameras.

  Chen’s train of thought was interrupted by the sight of a white-haired woman trotting toward Yan – if Yan she was – sobbing and blabbering.

  ‘Party Secretary Yan,’ the old woman said, out of breath, clasping her withered hands as if kowtowing to a gilded Buddha statue, ‘you alone can help us with the housing relocation and compensation.’

  She was probably talking about the compensation scheme for the relocation of the Red Dust Lane residents. The new policy was different, he had heard. It gave the neighborhood committee even more power.

  He wondered again whether this would prove to be his last visit to the lane.

  Out of the lane, Chen turned right to Fujian Road. He looked up to the steel overpass spanning Yan’an Road with a frown. It was an ugly sight, though it was probably a necessity for the pedestrians facing the ever-increasing, chaotic traffic in the city. Chen did not, however, find the idea of climbing the steep, slippery steps a pleasant one.

  Of late, he found himself short of breath when going up and down stairs. Perhaps it was because he’d not worked out for days. Perhaps he was no longer cut out to be a chief inspector – indeed, he was not. Perhaps he was growing old, aware of the young mermaids no longer singing for him …

  He did not want to speculate anymore.

  This morning, the next thing on his list was a visit to the Shanghai Foreign Language Bookstore on Fuzhou Road. It was no more than a ten-minute walk away. He wanted to buy books in preparation for a poetry translation project.

  He was not undertaking the project because of his belief that it takes a poet to translate poems, but because of a request from a publishing house, which in turn had received a request from the Wuhan Tourism Bureau. In a national conference, the CCP supreme boss had called for writers and translators to tell Chinese stories to the world, and the English translation of classical Chinese poetry was instantly seen as a politically correct choice.

  The publishing house had promised that for each of the Tang dynasty poems he translated, they would have a classical painting to match it. That was an appealing proposal to him. Classical Chinese literature criticism emphasized the poetics of painting in poetry and poetry in painting. Considering the reasonable success of the Judge Dee novella serialized in Wenhui Daily, the publisher had offered a generous advance.

  Chen considered that the project could also be important to him for a couple of reasons. To begin with, it might deepen the impression that the former chief inspector was being serious about the switch in his career. The prospect of him trying to make a difference within the system was gone. In the meantime, since a lot of the Party cadre subsidies he’d received had disappeared with the removal of his Party-member position in the police bureau, the royalties for such a translation project would be helpful. He had recently hired a maidservant for his mother.

  Crossing Yan’an Road and moving past Guangdong Road, he turned right on Fuzhou Road, which appeared to be weirdly deserted. Death had undone so many. The line echoed with a chilly message of snow. The pandemic had just started in Shanghai. How long it would last, no one could tell.

  At the intersection, he passed by the Wu Palace Hotel. It was an old hotel with an impressive façade and a large sign reading Not open for business. Was Covid spreading that fast? A number of Wuhan hotels had been turned into quarantine camps. A feeling of panic gripped him. But Shanghai was not so suffocatingly locked down as Wuhan.

  He was surprised at the sight of several super luxurious cars parked in an impressive line along the curb outside of the hotel. The reasons why big shots would choose to come to this second-class hotel were inscrutable.

  Half a block ahead, a classic Chinese bookstore came into view on the same side of the road as the hotel. With the sudden sirens from several racing ambulances, it was too difficult to cross the street to the Foreign Language Bookstore for the moment. The traffic jam seemed to be getting worse near Shandong Road. He might as well drop into the classic Chinese bookstore first, Chen contemplated, spending a short while browsing through some annotated classic Chinese poetry collections.

  When he re-emerged, carrying a couple of copies, he was startled once again by the shrieking sirens and flashing red lights on the street. Two tearing ambulances – no, three, with one speeding after another, and with several cars following the ambulances at a close distance. He wondered whether all these vehicles were heading so hectically to the Renji Hospital because of the pandemic. Renji was one of the best hospitals in Shanghai. With its central location in the city and experienced doctors, as well as state-of-the-art medical equipment, it was always crowded, not only with Shanghai patients but with those from other cities as well.

  Waiting for a while at the curb, Chen was still unable to cross Fuzhou Road to the Foreign Language Bookstore. In the next few minutes as he waited, a police car shrieked frantically past, leaving the traffic in another terrible mess.

  He thought he might as well do some shopping along this side of Fuzhou Road for the moment. There were the delicious traditional Chinese snacks in the Apricot Blossom Restaurant, for instance. It was his mother’s favorite restaurant, located just a stone’s throw away to the east. Its first floor was popular for barbeque pork buns and minced shrimp and pork dumplings. So he joined the customers lining up outside the restaurant door.

  It was not long before he carried out two plastic bags full of the flavorful specials: three portions of steamed barbeque buns, five portions of uncooked shrimp and pork dumplings, along with an expensive box of swallow saliva nest, which was supposed to provide a boost to the immune systems of older people.

  It never rains but it pours, though. On the corner of Shandong and Fuzhou Roads, an ambulance driving over from the west and another from the north happened to be converging into the terrible congestion near the front entrance of Renji Hospital.

  With the city’s continuous development progressing at a reckless speed, the area could have turned into a forgotten corner but for the existence of Renji Hospital. Consequently, Shandong Road looked narrower, shabbier with peddlers, cheap stalls, and eateries lined along both sides of the street.

  All of a sudden, Chen erupted into a fit of violent coughing.

  Because of the furious fumes from the cars? Because of him being no longer as strong as before? Because of feeling so nervous about Covid these days? Because …?

  He made an instant decision. Whatever the possible explanation for his cough, he’d better postpone the visit to his mother, he thought. At the beginning of the Chinese New Year, she’d insisted on him not coming over to her as she’d put herself into home quarantine because of a low fever. Luckily, it had turned out to be a false alarm, but she was vulnerable at her age.

  Worrying about the fit of coughing, he put on another mask and hailed a taxi home in a hurry.

  Back at his apartment, Chen felt inexplicably tired. Throwing himself upon the bed without taking off his clothes, he gazed up at the weird patterns shifting on the ceiling like ominous signs, and drifted into an oppressive dream about being lost in the dark night-time woods, surrounded by numerous trembling leaves and twigs – as if mysteriously surveilling the former chief inspector of the Shanghai Police Bureau—

  But he was startled out of the dream.

  ‘Don’t go out unless absolutely necessary,’ a neighborhood patroller was shouting through a high-volume loudspeaker under his window. ‘Our surveillance cameras are always watching and recording.’

  At every corner, at every minute, the neighborhood surveillance team was prowling around and shouting out even more urgently than those under Big Brother in 1984.

  ‘Stay at home. Practice social distancing. Wear a facemask wherever you go. We’re determined to win the battle against coronavirus under the great and glorious leadership of our Party government.’

  It was a scene eerily reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, the only difference being that back then it had been a team of seven or eight neighborhood activists, beating gongs and drums as if in the jungle, under a huge cardboard portrait of Mao …

  Still rubbing his eyes in disorientation, Chen got a phone call coming in, shrilling potently like a cricket resurrected in the dead winter. He picked it up. The phone screen showed an unknown number, and a husky female voice followed. ‘Are you Mr Chen Cao?’

  ‘Mr Chen Cao’ sounded portentous. In contemporary Chinese political language, ‘Mr’ was used exclusively for someone not seen as ‘one of us’ by the CCP authorities.

  Which he was, and a potential dissident and troublemaker to boot, currently under the close watch of the Party surveillance system.

  ‘Yes, I’m Chen Cao. What’s up?’

  ‘You were caught at the intersection of Fuzhou and Sandong Roads this morning.’

  ‘What?’

  He had been followed, Chen knew, having ruffled quite a few feathers within the Forbidden City. But why this sudden, mysterious phone call about his being caught at that particular locality this morning?

  ‘You have to take a Covid test, Mr Chen. So many possibly positive people have been pouring in and out of the hospital this morning.’

  ‘A Covid test?’

  Chen was flabbergasted. He must have been caught by a surveillance camera at that spot – close to the hospital, with so many ambulances milling madly around. So the cameras there might not have been shadowing him alone, but also each and every pedestrian who happened to be passing the area at that particular moment.

  ‘But I have not been in contact with any people from the hospital, so why do I have to take a test?’

  ‘Don’t ask so many questions, Mr Chen. It’s requested in accordance with the CCP’s zero-Covid policy.’

  Still, why they suspected he had Covid was beyond him. Did they think he had Covid? How could it have been traced to him so quickly? He did not raise the question. It was redundant. He knew too little about the advanced technology in the brave new world.

  The surveillance implemented by the CCP to contain the spread of Covid was harsh. Arguably, it was necessary to a certain extent, but it had been pushed to the political extreme. He could not help shuddering, feeling like a blind naked rat scurrying around in a gigantic glass cage under a magnifying glass.

  In terms of new historicism, China had long been a surveillance society in the name of the Baojia system. For the present moment, the regime was finding Covid a convenient excuse to exercise its totalitarian power by shadowing, tracing, watching people anytime, anywhere. It was seizing the Covid crisis to justify its iron-fist rule, and to brag and boast of the advantages of the superior socialism in China, as the pandemic in Wuhan began showing some early signs of improvement.

  ‘OK, I’ll take the test at the hospital tomorrow,’ he said mechanically into the phone.

  He made a cup of black coffee for himself, lost in his thoughts. A lot of the CCP’s new practices were totally unimaginable, even in George Orwell’s 1984.

  But what could he possibly do about it?

  Shaking his head, still lost in his thoughts, Chen was about to take a small sip of coffee when his phone shrieked again. Another unrecognized number showed on the phone screen. He picked it up.

  ‘Does this phone sound OK? I’ve just purchased a new SIM card. So I wanted to try it for a chit-chat with you. Now, you call me back at this number and see whether it works. In today’s Wuhan, no news is good news, you know.’ The caller hung up.

  It was his friend Pang in Wuhan, the prolific writer and vice-chairman of the Wuhan Writers’ Association, who had recently invited him as a keynote speaker to their literature forum and had shown him around the ancient city. Chen recognized his voice.